Projects for summer

Codecademy has great courses for beginners in different programming languages. They also teach how to code an interactive website.

If you have learnt python through codecademy, you can put the programming into practise using a Raspberry Pi to create pretty much anything you want. You can also use one with a graphical drag-and-drop language, Scratch. A guide to starting with the Pi can be found here.

If you've picked Python, then there are loads of resources online to develop. This interactive online book is great, but there are lots of other free books on the python website.​If you want to build stuff, you can use the school's Lego Mindstorms set, which has an "intuitive programming interface" and can make robots.

If you want to start using your code to do useful maths stuff, or are working towards the Informatics Olympiad, try looking at projecteuler.net. It has problems increasing in difficulty that should be able to execute without taking up too much memory. You can try them in any programming language using this compiling tool, but you can't import modules. For that, you need to download a compiler, which is generally free.

British Informatics Olympiad papers can be found here. It also includes some easier problems, and harder ones from the international final.